Logic vs. Intuition

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrReVlTUpLA

Currently the most popularly viewed entry of all time here at the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog is called Creativity and the Quantum Universe. Here's the video for that entry:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Life, consciousness, and creativity: these are all entwined together, different aspects of the same patterns. The idea that these processes somehow engage with spatiotemporal events in a way that embraces the proven non-locality of our universe is an important key here. Last blog we talked about imagining life and consciousness as an interlocking system which is constantly changing and revising itself throughout our lives. In his insightful book "What is Life?", Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way.

We've talked before about Schrödinger's Cat, the thought experiment which was originally intended to show how silly it is to apply quantum thinking to the macro world, and which instead has now become a useful jumping off point for understanding Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and the multiverse landscape. A few entries ago, in Placebos and Nocebos I mentioned that I'm listening these days to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and one of the important points they make is that our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm, as we see more and more evidence that in order to understand how everything fits together we need to embrace that there are hidden patterns and structures that exist "outside" of space-time, and some of those patterns are fractal or chaotic rather than linear or predictable. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind.

So. Scientific experiments are proving that life is able to use instantaneous quantum connections to function much more efficiently, and I've been insisting that seemingly "impossible" quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling are much easier to visualize when we think of them as coming from "folds" of the fourth spatial dimension through the fifth. I reached this intuitive conclusion decades ago, and we're now coming up on the three year anniversary of the launching of the tenth dimension website which has given me the opportunity to share these ideas with people from around the world. Which leads us back to the title of this entry: "Logic vs. Intuition". Which is more useful?


Recently I came across a website called "Artificial Intuition". It talks about a new approach to the quandary of how to program computers to think, and suggests that "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") runs into problems because it fails to understand how the human mind really functions: while logic should work for specific problem-solving within controlled parameters, intuition and inference applied to a sometimes contradictory input set better describes our day-to-day functioning. The english language is a perfect example - drawing meaning from words on a page or spoken to each other often requires us to fill in the blanks, accept contradictions, and make intuitive leaps, and this is what makes our language extremely frustrating to learn, particularly for persons not exposed to it since birth.

I would connect this back to the discussion we're having here by saying that Artificial Intelligence represents a more scientific materialist approach, while Artificial Intuition represents a more holistic paradigm: one which embraces the idea that there is more happening here than what logic alone can describe.

Artificial Intuition is the brainchild of Monica Anderson, who has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden, but who now works in Silicon Valley and is a US citizen. Her company Syntience is working on ways to bring her innovative approach to market (check out their Facebook Fan page here). At present they are still searching for funding sources: if you'd like to help support their independent research here's a link from the Artificial Intuition website.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from their website, this is from a page in which Logic and Intuition are compared:

Intuition and Logic are two strategies for prediction and problem solving.

We hear so much about the virtues of logic that we'd be excused to believe that logic was somehow the superior method, but a quick analysis shows that most actions we perform on a daily basis mainly use intuition.

Logic is not better, just different. Both strategies have their advantages and apply in different situations. Sometimes we need to use both. Sometimes we can use either one, because the problem is so simple it doesn't much matter how we solve it. Sometimes it matters; if we happen to choose the wrong approach, it may prevent us from solving our problem.

Computer-based intuition - "Artificial Intuition" - is quite straightforward to implement, but requires computers (a recent invention) with a lot of memory (only recently available cheaply enough).

If you look at the label cloud at the top of my blog, you'll see that intuition has been a running theme with this project since it began. This connects back to my song "Automatic", which makes the assertion that there are many times when that logical "narrator voice" of our conscious minds gets in the way, and that there are many complicated activities such as golf, playing a musical instrument, driving a car, or solving a large problem which will work better when we allow the more intuitive, less analytical part of our minds to take the forefront: in other words, when we can do these things "without thinking". This idea relates to a book I've talked about before, written by Julian Jaynes, called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": a challenging and fascinating work which suggests that the logical "narrator voice" of consciousness may only have developed in the last few thousand years, and that before that time all human beings operated in a mode where their conscious minds and the underlying "intuitive" parts of their minds were fully integrated. Although he died in 1997, the Julian Jaynes Society continues to promote his work, check it out.

And please spend some time over at the Artificial Intuition site learning more about this fascinating alternative methodology for making computers "smarter" in ways that more directly reflect our own strengths as human beings. This could hold immediate promise for tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, OCR correction, and implementing the Semantic Web. In the long term, I suspect this could allow the creation of computers that develop the emergent traits of consciousness through using a huge web of tiny little processes that are running concurrently. In that sense, the Artificial Intuition approach would appear to have connections to the consciousness theories of Douglas Hofstadter, who I've talked about many times before in blogs such as You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, I Know You, You Know Me, and We're Already Dead (But That's Okay).

To close, here's that song: "Automatic".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Do Animals Have Souls?

Polls Archive 33 - Could I Meet My Incarnation?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD-LRUptxFU

Poll 33 - "If, as Einstein said, the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion, then I could meet another incarnation of myself right now." Poll ended February 12, 2009 - 54% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

Last poll, I remarked upon how instructive these polls can be for me - for instance, I would have thought the idea that "time is a direction, not a dimension" would have gotten a lot of people to agree, since it's central to this way of visualizing reality, but that poll came in with very similar results to this current one. On the other hand, I would have thought that the idea that one could meet an incarnation of themselves right now would have seen more disagreement, since this is one of the more unusual ideas from my project. 54% of the visitors to this forum are willing to agree with that notion? I'm pleasantly surprised.

This is one of those ideas that occurred to me many years ago as an extension to my way of visualizing the dimensions of reality stacked one upon another, a concept that I had been showing to anyone who would listen for the last twenty-five years or so. Back in 2002, I wrote about 50 songs that explored the tangents that come from this way of visualizing reality, with the plan that I would pick my favorites and record a CD. I was also thinking that I would write a little booklet to accompany the CD in which I would explain how this "new way of thinking about time and space" tied all of the songs together.

When I actually got around to writing the CD booklet in 2005, it grew to 220 pages, and that "new way of thinking" eventually became my popular 11-minute animation which has been seen by millions of people around the world. Since the book's publication in 2006 my songs have become somewhat secondary to the project, which is fine, but I believe there are still ways that song lyrics can make these ideas more accessible. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Connections". The last verse of that song went like this:

I think I met myself today
I think I saw my eyes
Another me in another body
Livin another life

Likewise, with my song "Burn the Candle Brightly", I was thinking about the patterns representing us that carry on after death:

So when this journey is over
And that beautiful spark is finally gone
We can see that the vessel is empty
But we know that the light carries on

... and my song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" also talks about this idea from the first person perspective:

Now I lay me down to sleep
To rest my weary head
If I should die in slumber deep
Remember what I said

It’s not the end of the world
It’s not the end of the dream
It’s just the end of a body
Not the end of a soul

One of the books I've referred to a number of times in this blog is Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". Let me quote a few paragraphs from this enlightening and inspiring book, much of which is about the structures and forms that create the mysterious "I" of consciousness. In the latter part of the book, though, he expands these ideas into what it means to have a representation of other people - your spouse, your children, your parents, a very close friend - held within those same structures. Specifically, how much of that can be thought of as being an actual part of what it is that makes that person uniquely who they are? And if any part can be thought of in that way to any degree, then what happens when the real person dies? Hofstadter writes:

The bond created between two people who are married for a long time is often so tight and powerful that upon the death of either one of them, the other one very soon dies as well. And if the other survives, it is often with the horrible feeling that half of their soul has been ripped out. In happier days, during the marriage, the two partners of course have individual interests and styles, but at the same time a set of common interests and styles starts to build up, and over time a new entity starts to take shape.

And later on...

The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the "Holden Caulfield symbol" in J. D. Salinger's brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield -- but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn't as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a "miniature" one. You couldn't ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constitutued the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger's brain.

In my own book, I suggest that what each of us think of as our unique "soul" is actually a large and interconnected set of memes, some of which rise and fall in prominence over a lifetime, and memes by their very definition are patterns of information that exist across space and time, connecting together in ways that are beyond the physical limitations of the world we see around us. This leads me to some conclusions that are related to what Mr. Hofstadter is talking about, but I go a little further out on the same conceptual limb:

Here’s another way to look at this idea: if each of us has a unique soul, where are all the new souls coming from? Our planet’s population has exploded in numbers, so there must be new “soul material” being created from somewhere (if there really are only a certain number of souls allocated to this planet, then the chances of any one of us being the reincarnate soul of a person who lived here in the last few thousand years are approaching the chances of winning a lottery!).
In the New Age community, theories abound regarding what that source of all those new souls might be. All of those theories may be held within the version of reality that we are advancing here: if our soul is a conglomeration of memes that exist outside of time, then other versions of that soul could exist in other universes, in other locations within our universe, in other parts of the history and future of our universe, and even right now in other parts of our own world. The idea that it’s possible to meet another incarnation of yourself right now may take some getting used to, but it is an important aspect of the version of reality we are exploring.

And later on:

It may appear, then, that if we imagine a particular meme that has existed since the perceived beginning of our universe, collapsing a specific version of reality out of the wave of potential universes through the act of its observation, that we are imagining an aspect of the Creator-God. But there is a second way to view this puzzle. Could the feeling of “self” that each of us holds within us also be “just geometry”? In other words, what if this interlocking web of memes were exactly like the interlocking web of physical realities implied by the Many Worlds theory? This would mean that the potential for all ways of viewing the world, and the potential for all the different systems that we think of as being our own soul, are also held within an indeterminate wave of potential at the tenth dimension that has always existed, and will always exist.

In entries like Everyone Has a Story, Being More Fifth-Dimensional, You are Me and We are All Together, The Big Bang and the Big O, and Going to the Light I've continued my exploration of how ideas from cosmology and philosophy, from science and spirituality, can be blended together into an understanding of our reality which embraces a timeless perspective. Once we've arrived at an appreciation of the timelessness that exists outside of our spacetime, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe or any other arises, it becomes easier to think about how it really could be possible to meet another person right now who is basically you, living another life, in another body, experiencing the world with their own unique perspective but intimately connected through those underlying information patterns which exist outside of spacetime.

Other recent blogs about enfolded symmetry:
Dreaming of Electric Sheep
Imagining the Omniverse
We Start with a Point
A Point within the Omniverse
"t" Equals Zero
Going to the Light
The Invariant Set
Illusions and Reality

To finish, here's one of the songs we quoted from above: "Burn the Candle Brightly".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydru-VYfybU

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Polls Archive 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?

More on Augmented Reality

We talked back at the end of January about Augmented Reality. I'd like to show you a few more Augmented Reality demos that hint at some more of the promise of this technology, and then I'd like to show you a little augmented reality project we've been playing with here at my studio.

Here's a video of an "Augmented Reality Wormhole" that was created by Seb Lee-Delisle of Plug-In Media.


Papervision3D augmented reality wormhole from Plug-in Media on Vimeo.
A direct link to the above video is at http://vimeo.com/3016059.

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm fascinated by Wormholes: I think they can be used to demonstrate some of the basic ideas about this way of visualizing the ten spatial dimensions. While the above video isn't really a wormhole, it does tie in nicely with the discussions we've had here about Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, and recursive processes like video feedback that give us insight into the mysteries of consciousness.

Here's a little virtual race car being controlled by an xbox controller, this video was created by squidder.

Augmented Reality Driving Demo (flash + flartoolkit + xbox controller) from squidder on Vimeo.
A direct link to the above video is at http://vimeo.com/3364864

Here's Toyota's new entry into the world of Augmented Reality:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_7NW_u3VFo

And here's a new project which adds augmented reality to a book about UFOs:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV36Gs5-nxw

Most of what we're looking at here are just whimsical experiments, fun to play with but what's the point? A couple of days ago I attended (and, I'm proud to say, presented the awards at) an Interactive Media Conference in Saskatoon where "Serious Games" was a recurring theme - there are lots of initiatives under way to incorporate these kinds of technologies into serious applications. For instance, what if a doctor could use Augmented Reality to show a patient exactly where in their body their cancer tumor was, so that the patient could look at themselves in the computer monitor, turn one way or another and "see" inside themselves to understand exactly the location and size of the tumor, how it was oriented, and so on? This would be much more intuitive than looking at flat x-ray pictures, and therefore the discussion of treatment options could be simplified.

Advertising and entertainment will also be able to use this technology more and more to help engage their audience. Here's an example of how Lego are now using in-store kiosks to show what that box of Lego pieces will look like when you put everything together - not just as a picture on the top of the box now, but as an animated 3D model that appears when you show each box to the camera!


Lego's 3d Boxes from MyOnline VideoStorage on Vimeo.
A direct link to the above video is at http://vimeo.com/3387723

Which brings us to the little animated reality project we've been playing with here at my studio. Here in Canada, a month ago Doritos announced a "name the new chip flavor and create the advertising campaign for it" contest. After giving it some consideration, I thought this would be a good excuse for us to demonstrate how Augmented Reality could be used to promote a product. The chip flavor name we came up with for these chips is "Queso Diablo", and we're calling our campaign "What's In Your Bag?". Here's the text we used for our submission:

What's in your bag? Doritos Queso Diablo! Five cheeses, tomato, and a delightfully spicy burn, all perfectly blended together. The innovative marketing campaign for these chips uses something called "Augmented Reality": anyone with a webcam can hold the chip bag up to their computer and see the new flavor's devil-mouse mascot, having a party right in their Doritos bag! For a "work in progress" demonstration of what this will be like, go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/chips and see for yourself.

Let me be clear, I'm not telling you about this because I want you to go to the Doritos site and vote for our entry - the public voting has ended and we now wait to see whether the judging panel will pick our entry as one of the five finalists. There were a lot of interesting entries, some of them much more edgy or satirical than ours, so whether our concept is funny enough to match the usual "Doritos attitude" remains to be seen - but I think what we have here is a great concept that we could apply to many other products. What if every Kellogg's cereal had a tag on the front that let you see the mascot for a particular cereal dancing around inside the box you were holding? It could be great fun for kids to actually see themselves with Tony the Tiger or Toucan Sam (and so on). This could also be a great way to entice kids to eat foods that are currently considered to be "healthy" rather than "fun".

Here's the commercial we entered:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjQecb7izmk
The above commercial invites you to go to doritos.ca and click on What's In Your Bag: obviously that link would really only exist if won the contest. As it says in the text description above, in the meantime if you would like to see our "work in progress" demo of what this would look like, please go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/chips and follow the directions.

Frivolous use of a promising new technology? Sure. But this all can be easily related to a number of the blogs we've posted lately about Shamans and Modern Shamans, Comedians and Musicians: if Imagining the Tenth Dimension is about how our reality is defined by shapes and patterns that exist beyond spacetime, "just around the corner" in the fifth dimension and above, then augmented reality as a technology could prove valuable for helping us to visualize those things as well.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Our Non-Local Universe

You have a shape and a trajectory

George Harrison, born February 23rd 1943, would have been 66 years old today. Happy birthday, George, wherever/whatever you are right now.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZAMtmHkKg

I've talked many times now about Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful book "I am a Strange Loop". Coincidentally, both my book and Hofstadter's put forth the same idea: traditionally, it was believed that each human being has one indivisible soul. While there is indeed something unique about each person's individual experience, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space.

What are some of the ramifications of thinking of things this way? In entries like The Big Bang and the Big O we've talked about how sexuality provides connections across the history of life on this planet and perhaps even beyond. Music is also very much part of the same discussion, and we've looked at music as patterns that connect us together in entries like Music and the Dance of Creativity, The Geometry of Music, and Disorders of the Mind.

Music and sex are examples of the kinds of patterns that can connect us together. There are other patterns we can look at that show us how each of us is on our own individual journey within our physical bodies, each with our own unique pattern within the whole. In entries like Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory we've looked at how those patterns can be easily affected by adjusting our physicality, and in Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes 2 we've looked at the surprising new science of epigenetics, which shows that changes in lifestyle and attitude can cause "bad" genes to be switched off and "good" genes to be switched on.

For about fifteen years, back in the 70's and 80's, I was the music director of the local professional theatre here in my home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I recall a casual conversation I had with a young actress who said she was having trouble identifying with the character she was supposed to be playing. I asked her this question: what kind of music do you think this person would like to listen to? The actress immediately got what I meant: music has a physicality and emotional drive to it that can cause a person to change their body stance, adjust their mental attitude, and this is why certain people like certain kinds of music. If you're trying to "get into somebody else's headspace", so to speak, then imagine yourself liking the same music that they do.

Are you depressed? Put on a song that you associate with happy times and your mood will be elevated. Or, put on a song that resonates with your depression, at least you won't feel all alone. With people walking around with headphones and personal music players all over the place, this might seem very obvious; but physicality, mental attitude, and music are intimately tied together, and people who understand how much music affects them can use music very effectively as a way to enhance their activities throughout the day. This is also why it can be so annoying to be forced to listen to someone else's music if you don't want to: it's like their extra-dimensional "shape" is impinging upon your own.

So. Actors, whether they do this unconsciously or consciously, deal with these shapes and patterns that make each of us unique all the time. Watching an actor "become" someone else is a big part of the magic of that profession. An actor can change their physical stance, their body language, their internal rhythms, even the part of their body or face that their voice is "coming from". In other words, they find a way for what we might think of as their "soul" to adopt a different shape and trajectory, and that is something we as human beings recognize and are fascinated by.

Does this all sound too airy-fairy to you? Here's a link to an article from a few months ago in New Scientist Magazine, it was called "Voice Impersonators Use Brain to 'Become' Characters"

WHEN impersonators mimic an accent, celebrity, or do a voice-over for a cartoon, they may use areas of the brain not normally activated during speech, enabling them to "get under the skin" of their target.

Sophie Scott of University College London and colleagues asked seven people to impersonate 40 celebrity voices and a selection of foreign accents while lying in an fMRI brain scanner. Only regions normally activated during speech lit up.

In contrast, when British voice impressionist Duncan Wisbey did a range of impressions in the scanner, many more brain regions were active. The researchers say that this additional activity may reflect greater skill at impersonation. They presented the findings last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC.

Several of the regions in question are associated with vision and motor control. Scott suspects they light up because Wisbey thinks about what his target looks like and then imposes their features onto his own body to improve the voice.

Interestingly, Wisbey seems to produce the same pattern of brain activity even when the impression doesn't have to involve a specific individual, for example when mimicking accents. "When we asked him to try a Chinese accent, he said he was thinking about a woman who sells herbs near his house," says Scott.

Isn't that interesting? This is something I've seen myself with my son Mark, who has learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and is now learning Serbian. Each language causes people to hold their mouths and place their voices within their "mask" differently - in a sense Mark is becoming a different person as he speaks these languages.

Why are simple visualization techniques so effective in changing people's trajectory, putting them on a better path? Back in "Information Equals Reality" I talked through this as one way for people to move themselves to different trajectories within their fifth-dimensional probability space.

...imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information.

For people trapped in negative loops of self-destructive behavior, the idea that they can change their trajectory and that the way out is "just around the corner" in their own probability space could be what saves their life some day. To close, here's my song about that idea: it's called "Addictive Personality".


A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Creativity and the Quantum Universe

Polls Archive 30 - Do you believe in ghosts?

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=WN6Qi9jhses

Poll 30 - "Have you ever had an experience which led you to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world?" Poll ended December 30 2008. 43% said yes, while the rest said no.

This poll question relates to poll 28, which asked if visitors to the blog had ever seen a person's "aura". The results for both polls were very similar in terms of percentage for yes and no, although I think it's also noteworthy that a substantially larger number of people responded to this poll question than the other - this seems to confirm that a lot of people have an opinion about what happens to us after death, while less of us have an opinion about auras.

Continuing that idea, here's a link to an article from a recent issue of Scientific American Mind, called "Never Say Die - Why We Can't Imagine Death". In a "Key Concepts" summary, the editors boiled down Jesse Bering's article to these three points:

• Almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
• Even people who believe the mind ceases to exist at death show this type of psychological-continuity reasoning in studies.
• Rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.

What does this last point mean? This is quite easy to relate to if you've ever had a general anaesthetic. The surgeon asks us to count down from ten, we make it through a few numbers and then our experience of reality just "stops". Completely unlike the process of sleep, where we are still dimly aware of our surroundings, and able to be roused if need be, the patient on the operating table simply has a hole in their awareness, for them the surgery did not happen until they wake up in the recovery room. In the way of thinking that this project plays with, it's like their awareness was simply folded across the fourth dimension, creating a discontinuity where they simply "jumped" from the moment in spacetime where they were being put under, to the moment in spacetime when they start to come to afterwards. Here's a paragraph from Jesse Bering's article:

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

The article also talks about the concept of "person permanence" - something that delights babies is the surprise of playing "peekaboo", and young children soon learn that the people around them continue to exist even when they can't be seen. Person permanence, then, also gives us all a deep-seated intuition that some part of a person carries on after death. In this blog I've recommended Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" many times, because it offers some clear-headed discussions of the patterns and connections that carry on after a loved one dies.

So: there are many very logical reasons for why any of us can believe that some part of a person's spirit carries on after death, and perhaps a great many more visitors would have said "yes" if my question had been as simple as that. But what I was asking for was more specific than that - it's one thing to intuitively believe that some part of us carries on, and it's quite another to admit to having had a supernatural/paranormal experience which seemed to confirm that idea.

How many of us have heard stories like this one - "I remember the day Grandma died, she appeared at my window and smiled at me. The phone rang a few minutes later telling me she was gone, and all I could say was 'I know'." Anyone who has had an experience like that will tell you they know for sure that there are parts of us that continue on, and all of the above dispassionate discussions about person-permanence and consciousness will not convince them otherwise.

In blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, I've talked about how these ideas can be integrated into my way of visualizing reality. Our minds are very sensitive to patterns within the noise, and personally I have no trouble accepting the idea that parts of our consciousness exist within timelessness, connecting us all together across the spacetime of the fourth dimension, the probability space of the fifth dimension, and beyond. To close, here's my song about death and what carries on: "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep".

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next - a compilation of Polls 26 through 30

I Know You, You Know Me

(October 9th 2008 would have been John Lennon's 68th birthday. Happy birthday John, where ever/what ever you may be right now.)

A direct link to this video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1345477

What can I say? I'm from the baby boomer generation, and I remember the intense excitement of the Beatles' influence in the 1960s. As a tribute to those times, this blog and the next ones are using Beatles lyrics for their title: today's entry "I Know You, You Know Me" is from the song "Come Together", a call to action if I've ever heard one.

Whether you're talking about the sixties, or today at this very minute, the overwhelming feeling that we are all part of something big, a wave of change sweeping the planet, is a powerful experience. Today, there are people all over the world who are coming to believe that their new-found common ground of connected experience is going to allow them to make a difference, in ways that the baby boomers could only dream about.

As I've said before: it's all about connections. I believe that each of us every day are witness to emotional and intellectual connections across time and space that reveal things about the underlying structures of reality, and all we have to do is open our eyes to see.

A New Way of Visualizing
I came up with my way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago while working on the music for a play about the end of the world. I kept drawing pictures of branching timelines and folded dimensions on napkins, some people got it and many didn't, but I remained convinced that I had stumbled upon something that revealed a basic truth about our reality. After an accident during surgery in 2004 resulted in me almost bleeding to death on the operating table, I woke up saying to myself "I have got to get this idea out into the world" and eventually that's what I've done. It's all about connections, and finding the common experience that each of us shares without even realizing it.

An Interconnected System
Marvin Minsky talks about each person's consciousness being made of an interconnected, multi-layered system. Douglas Hofstadter talks about the systems within our consciousness that we share with each other across time and space. My approach builds from their ideas, says that we are not each a self-contained soul, but rather an interconnected collection of memes across time and space. Some of us are more connected to each other than others, because our systems overlap more! I've written a lot about all that in my book and in my blog.

My song "Connections" is one of the 26 songs attached to this project that explore the cloud of ideas related to this project, and the last verse of the song takes the idea of each of us each being part of a larger system to its logical extreme:

I think I met myself today
I think I saw my eyes
Another me in another body
Livin another life

If you've ever had that experience you know exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes you can just look into someone else's eyes and say to yourself "I Know You".

Saying "I Am You" to somebody else who has not worked through this line of reasoning will, in most cases, not be something they can accept. We each know there is something unique about our own awareness: but the idea that your or my individual consciousness is part of a much larger Observer system makes as much sense from a quantum mechanics viewpoint as it does from a spiritual/metaphysical viewpoint. In my book I said this:

Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.

In We're Already Dead (But That's Okay) I called it "option-itis": if there are too many choices, things become less interesting, or they become overwhelming. As I've said many times before, thinking about all options simultaneously is not something we can easily do, which is why this way of visualizing the dimensions works: because it takes all the options of one dimension, adds another new set of options with an additional dimension, and continues the process all the way up to every possible expression of the information that becomes our reality in one enfolded, simultaneous state. With this project, I'm calling that state the tenth dimension, but in doing so I always want to make sure people recognize that this "perfectly balanced state that holds everything else within it" has many other names!

Here's something I wasn't aware of: human beings are genetically extremely similar to each other, much more so than other animals on our planet. According to a recently released study, the genetic record indicates that about 100,000 years ago we as a species were almost wiped out - there were only a few thousand, perhaps even only a few hundred of us left! So, in that regard, the idea that we are all connected together has a very real physical and genetic explanation. Next blog, we'll continue with our Beatles titles and our discussion of the ways we're all connected together with an entry titled "You Are Me and We Are All Together".

To finish, here's a song about the parts of our consciousness that we share, and which exist outside of our physical bodies: "I Remember Flying". A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Soe2swgtsE


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMO1eyMRuM

"Option-itis"
Here's something I've said before: things become less interesting to us as the number of choices multiply. If, as I've proposed with this project, the sixth dimension includes every possible expression of the wave function for our universe, then it includes the version where I went crazy, shot up my town, died in a hail of bullets. Do I ever want to even witness that particular version of reality? No thank you!

Nine dimensions, three triads, enfolded into the tenth dimension
Last blog, we talked about how dimensions four through six can be called the "moral" triad. It's that narrowing down of possibilities, through the moral decisions I've made so far, that have created the fifth dimensional subset that I have access to from this "now" forward--and that will continue to be true for the rest of my life. If you are fully engaged with that process, what could be more exciting? Every instant we are observing new possibilities from a fantastically complex wave function that exists across the dimensions, but which are also uniquely defined by our own personal set of experiences.

Some people like to make fun of this idea, but this is essentially true: we are each creating a version of the universe through our role as quantum observers, and the path that each of us takes is unique. But we're each also participating in a consensual reality that has been created by the other people we share this reality with, which means their moral decisions are also part of my probability set. This is the hard part, because it means someone else can still choose to kill me, or they can do things that limit my access to possible futures I'd like to get to.

Thinking about Parallel Universes
Which takes us to the craziest part of this idea: each of us have already died through bad luck or bad choices made, that's just not the part of the multiverse that we're currently witnessing. Believe it or not, that's the idea that started this all for me back when I was seven, but it has taken me many years of thinking and reading to arrive at the conclusion that this crazy idea is supported by science!

I've written many times about the proof published by the Oxford University team under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, a proof which New Scientist magazine listed as one of the most important scientific stories of 2007: the bush-like branching structure of our quantum wave function, and the parallel universes that result from chance and choice for each of us are provably equivalent. This means the universe where I took five minutes longer to get out of bed this morning is part a different parallel universe, which is just as real as the one I'm currently witnessing, it just happens to not be the version I'm traveling within. Mind-boggling? You bet. But also, as it turns out, completely compatible with what I've been claiming since I first came up with this way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago.

I'm a Spime and So Are You
In the original tenth dimension animation, we imagined a person's body as if it were a spime: a four-dimensional object. In the animation, we said this:

If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension, you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.

If there were only one possible timeline from the beginning to the end of a person's life, that would be the end of the discussion. But as we explored in my book and blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, I'm proposing that our reality actually comes from the probability space of the fifth dimension, and it's easy to envision the branching structures that result from chance and choice as being part of a tree-like structure in the fifth dimension.

Souls as Systems
With this project, we're imagining a person's "soul" not as a single self-contained unit, but rather as being a multi-layered system of memes, a "society of mind" across the dimensions. Now we're talking about a set of parallel universes where, in many of them, bad things have happened that resulted in our deaths: but since everyone reading this blog is alive and not dead (I presume), we know that those branching timelines are not part of the parallel universe we're each currently witnessing. Yikes! What does this all mean?

How unlikely is the "Now" we're each currently in?
In Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about the idea that dark matter and junk DNA might be telling us more than we realize about how unlikely our current reality really is. And if we add up all of the bad luck and deliberate actions of others that could have resulted in each of us being dead by now, don't we arrive at the same conclusion? When you consider how many situations exist within all of the possible parallel universes for our universe where events conspired to result in each of us dying, it really does seem like a marvelous thing that we get to experience this reality which must be way out on the edge of the bell curve, a highly unlikely universe where each of us have managed to survive... for now.

So now, let's think about that "long undulating snake" that is our body not just in the fourth, but in the fifth dimension. From conception to death, there is the actual 4D "line of time" we have followed, and (as the Deutsch team have proved) there is the bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes extending out from our current "now". So we have something like a dandelion gone to seed held in our minds, with a single stalk representing the past and a "ray" of possible futures at the head.

But what about that missing 96%? Does it factor into the equation here as well? If we're thinking about all of the many possible paths that we have traveled upon up until now which, in a multiverse of possible timelines must include those times when we've already died, we can see in the past a great many other branches which extended off from the main stalk and ended. In my book I said this:

For each of us, we will be able to remember moments of malicious, random, or foolish action that could have done us in. It’s hard to forget that moment where a large object falling or a silly risk taken might have resulted in our death if we had only been in a slightly different place and time. According to the worldview we’re exploring, all of those things did actually happen: that drunk driver you saw last year came over the hill and smashed into you head on, and now you’re dead.

Asking the Big Questions
This is a question people ask themselves all time: what happens to us when we die? One interesting proposal I saw recently suggested maybe whatever we expect to happen is exactly what does happen! If you believe there will be nothing, that's what you get. If you believe that you will be able to continue to watch this particular version of the universe and see what happens to your loved ones, that's what happens. If you believe you will be enfolded back into a white light of all patterns and frequencies, that's where you'll go. And so on! By the time we're "outside" of the arrow of time, there's no reason to assume that these options are mutually exclusive, either: free from the limitations of a physical body riding along an entropy-driven timeline, a person's awareness could explore every parallel universe simultaneously if that was what they wanted to do!

I've quoted from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop before with his well-considered musings on what parts of the pattern that represents a person might continue on. Now here's a different way of thinking about this idea: if there is a fifth-dimensional spacetime tree of other possible timelines for our universe, and each of us has timelines where we've already died, then could it be that there are parts of our consciousness, the interlocking patterns that make up our "society of mind" that chose to jump on to our current timeline because they wanted to see what would have happened if they hadn't died? The old adage "once bitten, twice shy" takes on a whole new meaning - if there are tiny voices in my head saying "remember how I died last time I tried that!" then perhaps next time I will be less likely to take a silly risk.

My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is a meditation on the question of what happens to us when we die. To finish, here's a video of me sitting at my old piano singing that song.


A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For related discussion of these ideas:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
John August and The Nines

PS: Have each of us already died in other parts of the multiverse? That's one of our poll questions right now. And a few blog entries ago I mentioned a project called The Omniverse Almanac, some interesting fiction writing which explores a similar world of ideas, check it out!

Next: Time in 3 Dimensions

Video Feedback

EDIT: Due to popular demand, a DVD with ten of our favorite video feedback vlogs can be ordered from www.tenthdimension.com/store

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=-tt1-w-wIpg


In his great book "I Am a Strange Loop", Douglas Hofstadter used video feedback as one of the visualization tools for picturing how something as deceptively simple as a self-referential "loop" can create something as subtle and complex as consciousness. The fact that this is very similar to the "self-excited loop" that esteemed physicist John Wheeler used to describe the quantum observer creating and refining a universe through the act of observation - not just in the future but in previously indeterminate elements of the past as well! - is most certainly more than a coincidence: both are easily related concepts.

Over the last few months I have been using various video feedback tricks as visualization tools for a number of concepts related to this project: the flipbook universe, time as a direction, flatlanders and linelanders, quantum tunneling, higher dimensional patterns and waves that create our 4D reality... we've played with all those concepts in the video blogs created for this project.

So here this time, just for fun, is a compendium of some of the video feedback and video kaleidoscope blogs that have been created for this project. I hope you enjoy them!

The Big Bang and the Big Pie

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kiP12-u2GYY

Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens)

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1396117

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link for the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

I Know You, You Know Me

A direct link to this video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1345477

The Past is an Illusion

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCCp2UZTvak

Time in 3 Dimensions

A direct link to the above video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4FpPp8MPIQ

We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)

A direct link to the above video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMO1eyMRuM

Randomness and the Missing 96 Percent

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBDaZiMF8jg

Time is a Direction

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDajcGcKiAM

Unlikely Events and Timelessness

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpf3y_EdHco

Time in Either Direction

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

Magnets and Souls

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21KA8JL9qU

Wormholes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi2Nh_C8Pzk

What Would a Linelander Really See?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_-ZOIES0U

The Spacetime Tree

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L-BfvDYYWg

Changing Your Genes part 2

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYUlbYQuKA

Google, Memes, and Randomness

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXNWfX8sz8

Information Equals Reality

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-bAAZRp82M


John Wheeler and Digital Physics

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgQavdF4OzI

I hope you got something out of these explorations of the world of video feedback, and the ideas we looked at in these blogs. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Changing Your Genes - Part 2

God 2.0

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Y4xseftgQ


Last entry we talked about the "daily parrying" that would cause some people to look at a blog titled "God 2.0" and automatically assume that what is going to be talked about will be non-scientific meandering about the world of the spiritual and the metaphysical. If you're familiar with my blog or my book, you will already know that I am more interested in the middle ground - a place where philosophy and physics, spirituality and science can find ways to agree that they are really thinking about the same things.

The Skeptic
Michael Shermer is the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Michael's goal has been to poke holes in the questionable claims of fringe science, the paranormal, and a wide range of other areas that he has targeted with his razor-sharp debunking skills. This is why I found it quite marvelous when I picked up the July issue of Scientific American, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column this issue is entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".

Reinventing the Sacred
Mr. Shermer's article is about a fellow who comes from my neighboring province of Alberta, Canada: Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred". To quote from Michael Shermer's article about the book:

Kauffman reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says 'breaks no laws of physics' and yet cannot be explained by them. God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,' Kauffman declares.

I have spent time with Stu Kauffman... he is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.

Creativity and the "now"
I've talked many times here about the role of creativity in our universe, and how ideas from quantum physicist John Wheeler and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter can be tied together to show us how a self-excited loop can create not just a universe but life and consciousness as well. In my book I used physicist Richard Feynman's sum over paths idea to show how the past is just as probabilistic as we know the future to be. Now that Anton Zeilinger is publishing the results of experiments he and his team in Vienna have conducted that prove that we are operating in a probabilistic cloud where the only thing that is truly real for us is the constantly moving "now" of our observed reality, the ideas I proposed are being confirmed: and as John Wheeler suggested, this means that there are some indeterminate elements of the past that can be changed by our current observation. As I've been saying here, this means we can all select new trajectories from our current "now" at any time that launch us off on a new path, and accepting the indeterminate nature of the past is key to understanding how much power we are talking about here. As I discussed in Changing Your Genes, the scientific study that shows we are able to switch off and on various genes simply through changes in lifestyle and changes in attitude gives us a glimpse of how the past is not as carved in stone as we've been led to believe: because quantum physics is proving that our currently observed reality is derived from a multiverse of possible choices that exist in both the future and the past for our universe at any particular "now".

Enfolded Symmetry
Scientists like Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, and (of course) Richard Dawkins are atheists. I reference their work regularly with this project. I believe the Dawkins concept of genes as a "River Out of Eden" and memes as ideas that can be transmitted or shared without loss across time and space are both very useful and enlightened ways of imagining the underlying timelessness of our reality. My way of imagining how our reality is constructed agrees with Dr. Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which is "outside the system". My project also agrees with the Deutsch team's proof that the parallel worlds resulting from chance and choice are directly equivalent to the probabilistic results of quantum mechanics. Now, here's something new: the June 14 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine has an article about the award-winning work of mathematicians John Thompson and Jacques Tits, who have offered some mind-expanding proofs about how our amazing universe is derived from symmetries in the higher dimensions. This idea is related to Garrett Lisi's eight-dimensional E8 symmetry group, which I've referred to a number of times in this blog, and which I believe ties back into my project as well: by the time you have imagined an Omniverse which expresses all possible patterns of mass and energy, there is an equilibrium state where all of those possible patterns enfold back into a balance, where everything fits together into a perfect symmetry, which is the natural underlying state. Our universe is defined by higher dimensional patterns which give it its unique laws of physics and its breathtaking intricacy, right from the quarks and neutrinos up to the universe as a whole and all of its possible "spacetime tree" of expressions. In that sense, our cosmos is just a temporary deviation which has been set in motion by the breaking of that symmetry, and our line of time is a return to that perfectly balanced zero which existed before our universe began and which we'll return to after our universe has run its course.

God 2.0
So, while some would object to calling Stuart Kauffman's patterns of emergence that feed back on themselves to create our beautiful and complex universe "God", perhaps "God 2.0" is a useful way to reset our thinking about all this: all we are really talking about here is how higher dimensional patterns could be responsible for the universe we find ourselves in to be selected from the multiverse of all other possible universes, which ultimately, are all part of the Omniverse, where information equals reality. And that is a beautiful thing, worthy of our praise and our wonder.

Here is a song about that very idea: "Thankful".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries:
How to Make a Universe
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
The Omniverse
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

Next: Wormholes